Wandering with the Wind...

Friday, July 13, 2012

'[The neurotic] perceives himself as unreal and reality as unbearable, because with him the mechanisms of illusion are known and destroyed by self consciousness. He can no longer deceive himself about himself and disillusions even his own ideal of personality. He perceives himself as bad, guilt laden, inferior, as a small, weak, helpless creature, which is the truth about mankind, as Oedipus also discovered in the crash of his heroic fate. All other is illusion, deception, but necessary deception in order to be able to bear one's self and thereby life.'

- The Denial of Death: The Present Outcome of Psychoanalysis - The Problem of Illusion (P.188, Rank)

' ... the question of human life is: on what level of illusion does one live? This question poses an absolutely new question for the science of mental health, namely: What is the "best" illusion under which to live? Or, what is the most legitimate foolishness? If you are going to talk about life-enhancing illusion, then you can truly try to answer the question of which is "best". You will have to define "best" in terms that are directly meaningful to man, related to his basic condition and his needs. I think the whole question should be answered in terms of how much freedom, dignity and hope a given illusion provides. These three things absorb the problem of natural neurosis and turn it to creative living.'

- The Denial of Death: The Present Outcome of Psychoanalysis - Health as an Ideal (P. 202)

'It is always the whole existence of the melancholic patient which has failed to take over openly and responsibly all those possibilities of relating to the world which actually would constitute his own genuine self. Consequently, such an existence has no independent standing of its own but continually falls prey to the demands, wishes and expectations of others. Such patients try to live up to these foreign expectations as best they can, in order not to lose the protection and love of their surroundings. [But they go more deeply into debt.] Hence the terrible guilt feelings of the melancholic ... derive from his existential guilt.'

-The Denial of Death, A General View of Mental Illness - Depression (P. 211, Medard Boss)

'Dependency is the basic survival mechanism of the human organism. ... When the adult gives up hope in his ability to cope and sees himself incapable of either fleeing or fighting, he is "reduced" to a state of depression. This very reduction with its parallel to the helplessness of infancy becomes ... a plea for a solution to the problem of survival dependency. The very stripping of one's defenses becomes a form of defensive maneuver.'

- The Denial of Death: A General View of Mental Illness - Depression (P. 213, Gaylin)

'...the terrible guilt feelings of the depressed person are existential, that is, they represent the failure to live one's own life, to fulfill one's own potential because of the twisting and turning to be "good" in the eyes of the other. The other calls the tune to one's eligibility for immortality, and so the other takes up one's unlived life. Relationship is thus always slavery of a kind, which leaves a residue of guilt ... hardly sum up all the guilt that the patient feels, or at least accuses himself of. To judge by his own self-accusations of worthlessness, the patient feels an immense burden of guilt. We have to understand this self-accusation not only as a reflection of guilt over unlived life but also as a language for making sense out of one's situation. In short, even if one is a very guilty hero he is at least a hero in the same hero-system. The depressed person uses guilt to hold onto his objects and to keep his situation unchanged. Otherwise he would have to analyse it or be able to move out of it and transcend it. Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility, especially when the choice comes too late in life for one to be able to start over again. Better guilt and self-punishment when you cannot punish the other - when you cannot even dare to accuse him, as he represents the immortality ideology with which you have identified. If your god is discredited, you yourself die; the evil must be in yourself and not in your god, so that you may live. With guilt you lose some of your life but avoid the greater evil of death. The depressed person exaggerates his guilt because it unblocks his dilemma in the safest and easiest way.'

- The Denial of Death: A General View of Mental Illness - Depression (P. 214)

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~~~*Left with the Winds at 8.28pm*~~~

Aurinya blogged at 8:24 PM

Roaming the Winds